The maximum ventricular elastance (Emax) will be a good quantitative index for weaning the patient from the ventricular assist device if the Emax can be obtained low-invasively. The purpose of this research was to develop a method for estimating the Emax beat-to-beat and less-invasively.First, it was formulated that the process for estimating the Emax is a kind of inverse problem. This leaded to an algorithm for estimating the Emax beat-to-beat on the basis of only two measurements : ventricular pressure and ventricular volume or aortic flow.Second, the algorithm was implemented on a personal computer system to calculate Emax in a real-time fashion.Third, the animal experiments using goats were carried out in many situations with change in preload and afterload or with injections for changing cardiac function. The data obtained from the experiments)showed that the correlation coefficient of the Emax between the proposed method and the traditional method was about 0.9. This indicates that the proposed method is sufficiently useful for monitoring cardiac function. Furthermore, it could be shown that the proposed method is superior to the traditional methods because the estimation error can be evaluated quantitatively as an error with respect to the intercept of the end-systolic pressure volume regression line.To apply the proposed method to actual clinical settings, the proposed method must be further improved so that another less-invasive information like aortic pressure instead of ventricular pressure can be used for estimating the Emax.